I am fully aware of the pressures involved in the preparation of material for chamber applications, default judgment applications, payment claims and adjudication applications. I have been there and experienced it.
Relevant History
We have been calculating 67P interest since 2000.
At that time it was generally accepted that the relevant interest rate was the rate published in various daily newspapers.
The information published by the Reserve Bank of Australia was not readily available to the general public. The information on its web site was several weeks behind and the material in the journal was several months behind.
Reconciling the rates published in the daily newspapers with those eventually published by the Reserve Bank of Australia indicated that there were differences for just about every day that there was a record.
We purged our systems of the data that had been obtained from the newspapers and started to rely only on the material obtained directly from the RBA. That involved special arrangements being put in place.
The RBA has now changed its mode of operation and updates the information available on its web site each New South Wales business day.
We obtain our rates from that site.
Availability of data
The problem is that the RBA does not make its data available until after 11:30 am EST.
For example, the interest rate for Friday will not be available until 11:30 am Monday at the earliest (provided Monday is not a public holiday in New South Wales).
There have been occasions when there has been some sort of glitch and the information has not been available until much later in the day or even the next day.
The RBA does not update during the weekend or on public holidays in New South Wales so we cannot do anything until the next working day.
Ringing up
There is also a process where you can ring the RBA dealing room direct to get the interest rate early.
The problem with that process is that the rate given by the dealing room has often been substantially different to the rate that was eventually published later in the day.
Why we do not use secondary sources temporarily
As indicated above, there can be significant problems with the accuracy of data published in secondary sources (e.g. Newspapers).
We would rather have no data than publish bad data.
We are also busy people and do not have the time to be inserting and removing potentially bad data.
If you really must have that last line of interest calculation before we are able to make it available, I recommend that you do your calculation on this site and obtain the line by line print out.
You can than do the final line of the calculation yourself based on an interest rate provided by a secondary source.
When do we update
We update the information in our system as soon as we are able after 11:30 am on a business day.
At that time we also run various programmes necessary to operate our system and make this service available. That process can result in an outage or strange behaviour for about 5 minutes.
Special arrangements
As I have indicated above, I know what it is like to have to go to court or meet a statutory deadline.
If you know that there is a special issue coming up and we may be able to assist you, let us know a couple of days in advance and we will try to help.
Do not attempt to make these arrangements just before 9:00 am on the day the information is needed as I have other things to do and am not available without prior arrangements being made.